But why do they want to do that, is the question

Parkour fans rejoice as skill finally becomes useful

Yeah. Reddit is technologically very bland. It’s “easy” to make a Reddit clone - the community is what makes it tick. But YouTube needs crazy levels of infrastructure to provide the full experience that it does. When Reddit collapses there’s places to migrate to. But if YouTube collapses it’s just a loss.

Seriously. What candidate is it that this innocent perfect figure here represents? Which politician is it that is like this?

Bruh. This is truly surprising. I feel like for a phone like this, it must be like 90% of the target market that would hate this? Seems like an unimaginably bad business decision. Of course, if FB gave them enough money, then this is kinda like taking a bribe to stop competing.

What is it that you go to Reddit for that you don’t get from Lemmy? To me, the only reason someone might look at Reddit instead is if Lemmy lacks the content they seek - do you think that’s the case for you? Or maybe it’s something else?

Man Newsom is such a clown with this vanilla type statement. Bro is definitely gearing up to run for president

What an odd question. Why do you wanna know? Also, I don’t know.

Took me awhile to get back to this, but yeah I agree that it seems at least conceptually solid. The big barrier is that, like jarfil mentioned, you’d need at least 200 million sites indexed, so you’d need a good amount of users for it to work. And the users would need to consent to running some software that basically logs all the pages they visit. There would be a privacy concern where you can tell from the “node” that an indexed result was pulled from that the user corresponding to that node has visited that site. This could maybe be fixed by each user also downloading indexed site data from others aside from what they personally use, thus mixing in their own activity with others indistinguishably? Probably clever vulnerabilities in that too though.

Structurally it seems a lot like DNS. If only DNS servers were fine storing embeddings of site content and making those queryable, it would seemingly accomplish the same idea, aside from it being in the hands of DNS operators. Of course, that massively multiplies the amount of data these servers need to an impossible degree.

I still need to read up on what primitive indexing really looks like and how much space it takes to store per site.

Hrrmm. Webrings it is. But also, the search engine problem seems like one calling out for a creative solution. I’ll try to look into it some more I guess. Maybe there’s a way that you could distribute which peer indexes which sites. I would even be fine sharing some local processing power when I browse to run a local page ranking that then gets shared with peers…maybe it could be done in a way where attributes of the page are measured by prevalence and then the relative positive or negative weighting of those attributes could be adjusted per-user.

Hope it’s not annoying for me to spitball ideas in random Lemmy comments.

Never heard of Kagi before, article convinced me I don’t wanna use it anyways…lol.

Wasn’t the original Google search algorithm published in a research paper? Maybe someone with more domain knowledge than I could help me understand this: is there any obstacle to starting a search engine today that just works like that? No AI, no login, no crazy business…just something nice and rudimentary. I do understand all the ways that system could be gamed, but given Google/Bing etc.'s dominance, I feel like a smaller search engine doesn’t really need to worry about people trying to game it’s algorithm.

I was wondering this awhile ago too. There are ways but it’s pretty hardcore stuff from what I can tell. It’s basically a lost cause at that point. Some solutions involve using $30,000+ laser machines to manipulate the hardware physically and cause glitches in the locking. But even then the devices have self-destruct mechanisms to detect tampering. Not like the phone explodes, but they self-destruct the cryptographic keys needed to unlock the bootloader, and then you’re stuck trying to brute force in by guessing keys, which most likely will take literally a million years.

At this point I’m thinking of just carrying around a small touchscreen laptop

Yeah, you’re absolutely right and I agree. So then do we have to resign the situation to being an eternal back-and-forth of just developing random new challenges every time the scrapers adapt to them? Like antibiotics for viruses? Maybe that is the way it is. And honestly that’s what I suspect. But Anubis feels so clever and so close to something that would work. The concept of making it about a cost that adds up, so that it intrinsically only effects massive processes significantly, is really smart…since it’s not about coming up with a challenge a computer can’t complete, but just a challenge that makes it economically not worth it to complete. But it’s disappointing to see that, at least with the current wait times, it doesn’t seem like it will cost enough to dissuade scrapers. And worse, the cost is so low that it seems like making the cost significant to the scrapers will require really insufferable wait times for users.

By negligence, I meant that the cost is negligible to the companies running scrapers, not that the solution itself is negligent. I should have said “negligibility” of Anubis, sorry - that was poor clarity on my part.

But I do think that the cost of it is indeed negligible, as the article shows. It doesn’t really matter if the author is biased or not, their analysis of the costs seems reasonable. I would need a counter-argument against that to think they were wrong. Just because they’re biased isn’t enough to discount the quantification they attempted to bring to the debate.

Also, I don’t think there’s any hypocrisy in me saying I’ve only thought about other solutions here and there - I’m not maintaining an anti-scraping library. And there’s already been indications that scrapers are just accepting the cost of Anubis on Codeberg, right? So I’m not trying to say I’m some sort of tech genius who has the right idea here, but from what Codeberg was saying, and from the numbers in this article, it sure looks like Anubis isn’t the right idea. I am indeed only having fun with my suggestions, not making whole libraries out of them and pronouncing them to be solutions. I personally haven’t seen evidence that Anubis is so clearly working? As the author points out, it seems like it’s only working right now because of how new it is, but if scrapers want to go through it, they easily can - which puts us in a sort of virus/antibiotic eternal war of attrition. And if course that is the case with many things in computing as well. So I guess my open wondering are just about if there’s ever any way to develop a countermeasure that the scrapers won’t find “worth it” to force through?

Edit for tone clarity: I’m don’t want to be antagonistic, rude, or hurtful in any way. Just trying to have a discussion and understand this situation. Perhaps I was arrogant, if so I apologize. It was also not my intent, fwiw. Also, thanks for helping me understand why I was getting downvoted. I intended my post to just be constructive spitballing about what I see as the eventual inevitable weakness in Anubis. I think it’s a great project and it’s great that people are getting use out of it even temporarily, and of course the devs deserve lots of respect for making the thing. But as much as I wish I could like it and believe it will solve the problem, I still don’t think it will.

Yeah, well-written stuff. I think Anubis will come and go. This beautifully demonstrates and, best of all, quantifies the negligence negligible cost to scrapers of Anubis.

It’s very interesting to try to think of what would work, even conceptually. Some sort of purely client-side captcha type of thing perhaps. I keep thinking about it in half-assed ways for minutes at a time.

Maybe something that scrambles the characters of the site according to some random “offset” of some sort, e.g maybe randomly selecting a modulus size and an offset to cycle them, or even just a good ol’ cipher. And the “captcha” consists of a slider that adjusts the offset. You as the viewer know it’s solved when the text becomes something sensical - so there’s no need for the client code to store a readable key that could be used to auto-undo the scrambling. You could maybe even have some values of the slider randomly chosen to produce English text if the scrapers got smart enough to check for legibility (not sure how to hide which slider positions would be these red herring ones though) - which could maybe be enough to trick the scraper into picking up junk text sometimes.

I know it’s popular to call conservatives dumb and while I don’t like to beat dead horses, I really think the explanation for this is that they’re dumb. The illiterate form of dumb, to be precise. The caps are a way of adding emphasis - which is something that can also be done by phrasing, word choice, sentence structure, and so on. But those techniques would require a beyond 4th grade level of writing and reading ability, so they do not succeed in the conservative communication marketplace.

I will add a disclaimer, my beloved Nietzsche also does all caps words sometimes, but I believe that since this is alongside his impressive eloquence, it is clearly not a sign of stupidity in that context. Likewise, it is not a sign of stupidity in many other contexts. That is to say:

Using that style of communication does not always make it a safer bet that someone is stupid, but being stupid does make it a safer bet that they use that style of communication.

What do you mean by dox here? I usually think of dox as being, real name, real address, etc. But I’m having trouble seeing how even my Lemmy instance admin could figure that out about me.

What’s wild to me is how much more frequent this sort of thing seems to be becoming. Cloud services make a lot of money, but this kind of stuff is gonna drive risk-averse companies (aka huge companies with lots of money) back to on-prem or other alternatives. It seems very short-sighted. If I was a cloud provider I’d want to make myself look as ruthlessly indifferent to the services I host as possible.

“In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine. But what if the requester was a government that just didn’t like what an enterprise said or did?” I find this quote hilarious, because that “what if” scenario sounds like exactly what happened.

My brother, I am someone who is pretty pro-AI art, for reasons too complex to get into, but which basically have to do with latent possibility spaces and the boundary between discovery or creation.

I am typically pissed off and annoyed when people get their pitchforks out at any mention of AI art. I also consider myself a pretty decent amateur artist. I draw, I paint, I 3D model. I also like working with the more core technologies of AI. I have a horse in both races, so to speak.

But this post, this post makes me feel like one of those pitchfork-wielders that typically annoy me. Why? Because you’ve depicted the artist as a rude snob who looks down on poor people, and is thereby getting their just deserts and having their smugness deflated now that they’re no longer needed. This is such a wildly inaccurate perception of artists. 9999/10000 artists make probably less than $40,000/yr in the U.S. Most of them could make more money doing something else, but they don’t, because they love art. They aren’t looking down on poor people, they are poor people.

And no, $60 really isn’t enough. Nobody is getting paid enough these days. Do you have any skills or crafts that took you 4 years of work to become even barely good enough at that someone would even consider hiring you? And if so, how would you like it if someone asked you to work for days at a rate below minimum wage? Don’t people deserve to have not just subsistence lives, but nice happy lives in return for creating something nice and happy for you?

No artist is sneering at your low commission offer on account of you being poor. The sneering is that, you can spend $60 on something that you don’t need whatsoever, whereas they likely need your $60 to buy something like food. These are people who live ENTIRELY off what people pay them for their work, no wage, no tip, etc. How could you ever look down on them for wanting to have a nice life, while at the same time wanting what they provide? It’s fine if you’re not willing to pay $260 for their work, but it’s not fine to look down on them for it, and it’s nonsense to characterize them as a judgemental snob. Unless you’re trying to commission Jeff Koons or something, any artist you talk to is struggling to get by just like everyone else. You aren’t “serving them right” or “teaching them a lesson” by going to AI instead. You’re just making it harder for them to make a living doing what they love, and regardless of whether AI does it better than them, or another artist is willing to live a shittier life for that and therefore charge a lower price, that’s nothing to be proud of.

I don’t want to be mean or make you feel bad, though, I just want you to stop and think about what it must feel like to be a poor artist and see something like this. No doubt they’re suffering extra competition as a result of AI, but should we revel in that? If in my small town, I have a neighbor who makes a decent living by charging $20/ticket to his guitar concerts, and then one day another guy moves in, who plays way better my neighbor, and only charges $10/ticket…such that eventually my neighbor can’t afford to make a living playing his music any more and picks up a job he hates instead…That’s just a shitty situation. And I’m not going to go as far as many others do and say you’re bad for buying the $10 tickets from the new guy. I get it, you’re struggling too, we all are. You want some joy for the lowest price you can get it, and if it’s better, why not? But that doesn’t mean we need to turn our noses up at our neighbor and deem his shows “overpriced” - especially if he’s already living on less money than his patrons to begin with.